Michael Texter

HSV300-S Controllers

Michael Texter

2 Weeks

Duration

$200

Budget

Repairing and resetting EVA HSV300-S controllers back to factory defaults. This involved dismantling, testing, configuring and reassembling various parts of the controllers, followed of course by more testing. The root password wasn't easy to change.

Grand Rapids, MI, United States

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I work for a third party hardware maintenance company, so we like to make sure everything we use, sell or send to our field engineers is completely functional and as close to factory settings as possible. Anytime a customer uses one of these HSV300-S controllers, which is essentially an EVA4400 with an embedded switch, a configuration is usually put on it. With these I had the special challenge of finding out how to reset the root password when in almost every case it had been changed from the default.

Our customers will send us their failed controllers as cores which we then will try to fix. With these it was pretty trivial, a DIMM was at fault almost every time. What was NOT trivial at all was resetting the root password.

These run a version of FabOS, usually 6.2 or 6.4 or something, and to put one of these into stock as a refurbished unit, it was necessary to regain root access to them. The controllers house a 512MB CF card buried deep inside a labyrinth of PCBs and retainer screws. 9 screws, a riser, and a few gray hairs later, I had the CF card removed.

This is what houses FabOS, configurations, passwords, etc. Windows wouldn't recognize the format of the card, so it was off to linux land. I plugged my CF reader into a CentOS server, mounted the CF card, and noticed not one, but two images on the CF card. I went into the scripts directory and found a 'passwddefault' script. I pored over the contents of this script, seeing exactly which directories and files it modified, and which values get reset. One by one I went through the lines of the script and executed their commands on the CF card, on each of the two images of the CF card.

At that point it was reassembly and testing time, and luckily enough it worked flawlessly the first time! I then took a bit-for-bit image of the CF card, which I can dupe onto a new CF card anytime we get one of these controllers back as a core. Hooray!